While my Republican brethren bray across the cablesphere about yesterday’s SCOTUS decision upholding Obamacare, I went a’reading to see what the long-time SCOTUS reporters had to say.

Writing about the majority opinion Linda Greenhouse wrote:

The chief justice’s masterful opinion showed that line of argument for the simplistic and agenda-driven construct that it was. Parsing the 1,000-plus-page statute in a succinct 21-page opinion, he deftly wove in quotations from recent Supreme Court opinions.

Who said that we “must do our best, bearing in mind the fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme”? Why, it was Justice Scalia (actually quoting an earlier opinion by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) in a decision just a year ago.

And who said that “a provision that may seem ambiguous in isolation is often clarified by the remainder of the statutory scheme” because “only one of the permissible meanings produces a substantive effect that is compatible with the rest of the law”? Why, Justice Scalia again.

Five years ago I retired, washed my hair a few times, even got around to – finally! – dusting all my books. Then I came here and, in complete ignorance, choose a blog name that is also the title of a Woody Allen movie – thereby condemning myself forevermore to also-ran status on the search engines.

But here, I found something wonderful. I found a vibrant, interesting and often very funny community of people who care enough to speak up and to stand up for what they believe. I found men and women of all ages and backgrounds. I found you – and your blogs. And I followed you. I found bloggers producing literature, bloggers who could write for The New Yorker, bloggers who make me laugh, bloggers who taught me, bloggers who made me mad but from whom I learned to listen. Really listen.

Thank you.

Once before I noted my own anniversary and included the first post at Whatever Works. Here it is again:

I just came across an interesting bit (interactive and with links) at ‘The Upshot’ on the NYTimes website.

Since the beginning of 2009, more than 1,500 people have appeared on five Sunday news and political talk shows: “Meet the Press,” “Face the Nation,” “This Week,” “Fox News Sunday” and “State of the Union.” Many are familiar faces in Washington, where lawmakers, consultants and pundits routinely sound off on the week’s news, while others come from the worlds of entertainment and sports. Researchers at American University have collected more than 9,000 appearances. Below is a listing of those guests, excluding network employees or contracted regular guests.

A total of the Top Ten with the most appearances (McCain tops them all) shows:

Republican guests: 405

Democratic guests: 262

Any questions?

(The site, by the way, lists all 1500. I guess there’s always someone to count everything.)

UPDATE: Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury who was at the center of the financial meltdown, appeared only once in five years. Books have been written about him, movies have been made about him (one quite excellent – can’t remember the name) but he wasn’t someone the gasbags wanted to have a word with?

How about we get really humanitarian. Let us reach out and invite the persecuted Yazidi minority threatened by ISIS to establish a community here in the US. We’ve sent bombers but those people are still in desperate straits.

The entire world population of Yazidis may be as few as 700K, and those in Iraq probably number between 200-300K, possibly less. There’s already a large community in Nebraska.

There is a bizarre case out of Maryland where school officials sent teacher and novelist Patrick McLaw, 23, to an emergency medical evaluation for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. That’s it. A language-arts eight grade teacher at Lane Middle School writes a book about a school shooting and he is put on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office, and sent away for evaluation. “The Insurrectionist” happens to be set 900 years in the future but the board couldn’t just wait for the shooting to occur and had to act. What is striking is that all of these steps have been taken and McLaw has been effectively treated as a danger to children but no one has said a thing beyond the novel that is the basis for the actions. Was there something else that raise…

“An army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers, are terrorizing the entire community – lying, bullying and manipulating their way around the internet for profit and attention.”

There’s something in the ether today that insists I post this. For the third time. But why not – it’s still absolutely true that Dion & The Belmonts pretty much did this stuff to perfection. (See Shep? I pay attention.)

A few years ago I found myself at a Miami Heat game because my nephew was on the coaching staff of the visiting team. I never let that nephew know, but throughout the game, my eyes were riveted on James, and on the astonishing and quite beautiful thing that is LeBron playing basketball.

I became a fan, watched the games and – in the most innocent hero-worship kind of way – developed a school girl crush on the guy. Unrequited apparently.

. . . we celebrate our independence. Because 238 years ago a brave group of revolutionaries threw off a colonial power. That’s something that has happened around the world many times – both before and since. But . . .

. . . I think our greater achievement is this: for 225 years we have maintained a continuity of government (even in war), peacefully transferring power (that one’s just since Washington to Adams, so 214 years) over and over . That’s a testament to the brilliance of our constitution and our continuing respect for it. Good for us!

Inside the majestic building housing the Supreme Court of the United States (truly a gorgeous building), the Justices yesterday ruled that the 35-foot buffer zone around an abortion clinic “violated protestors’ freedom of speech”. Outside that same building, the exclusion zone for protestors is 250 feet.

Last week Bill Maher said: “There are 278 Republicans in Congress. (With Eric Cantor’s defeat), they are now all Christian and all white except for one black senator, who was appointed.”

With tortured twisted reasoning, Politifact rates that Half True. First they describe the Dems:

The 2012 elections ushered in the first Buddhist in the Senate (Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono, a Democrat), the first Hindu in either chamber (Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat), and the first Congress member to list her religious affiliation as “none” (Arizona Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat) . . . They joined two Muslims (Democrats) and a Unitarian Universalist (a Democrat).

They don’t offer a total of non-Christian Dems in Congress. It’s 37. Now here’s what they say of Congressional Republicans:

When it comes to Republicans,192 of 278 GOP members identify with a Protestant denomination (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc.), 70 identify as Catholic, three are Orthodox Christian, and 12 are Mormon (more on that in a moment). Cantor, a Republican from Virginia, is Jewish and makes No. 278, but Brat, the Republican who could succeed him after the November election, is Catholic.

So until the next Congress is sworn in in January, we can count 277 Christian and one Jew. Politifact notes that some people don’t consider Mormons Christian. Which matters not at all because that’s how Mormons identify.

In 2003, when American troops first rolled into Baghdad, they destroyed the Iraqi state and its institutions; for the next eight and a half years they tried to build something to replace it. The truth is that the political system imposed on the Iraqis has never worked very well without substantial U.S. involvement; since the Americans left, it hasn’t worked at all. American diplomats and military advisers can’t save Iraq and they can’t govern it, but the decision by President Obama to return to Iraq amounts to a recognition that there was work left unfinished. It’s likely to be a long and difficult job

*Filkins reported from the onset of Iraq War in March of 2003 through 2006. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of New York Times reporters in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

His book recounting those years – Forever War – is stunning and should be read by anyone who wants to see our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan up close. Reviews almost universally described it as a classic in the tradition of witness, a true account from the type of war correspondent rarely seen these days.

LA Times said it “is likely to be regarded as the definitive account of how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were experienced by those who actually waged them.” That’s about right.

Starting tomorrow, the days will shorten (hey, we just got summer started here!), and shorten and shorten. Good.

I like my day-lengths kind of medium. Not too long, not too short. I guess mid-September is Moe’s time – or would be if some fools in the Congress hadn’t decided to extend that WWI invention, Daylight Savings Time. Because we always need extra hours of daylight to get the fields tilled and the crops in. You know.